In The News

UVA Doctorial candidate, Thomas Talhelm talks with Les Sinclair about how Liberals and Conservatives think like they're from different cultures.

Whether he's arguing for the right to wear a half-inch beard or the right to sacrifice chickens and goats, UVA Law Professor Douglas Laycock is a champion of religious liberty. Soundboard's Nathan Moore talks to him about Holt v. Hobbs, his latest Supreme Court win.

Political conservatives in the United States are somewhat like East Asians in the way they think, categorize and perceive, while liberals in the U.S. are more extreme in thought, categorization and perception, according to a new cultural psychology analysis. "We found in our study that liberals and conservatives think as if they were from completely different cultures - almost as different as East and West," said lead author Thomas Talhelm, a University of Virginia doctoral candidate in cultural psychology. "Liberals and conservatives categorize and perceive things differently, ...

The Supreme Court rules 9-0 for Muslim inmate who wants to grow beard.  U.Va. Professor Douglas Laycock argued the case before the court and Les Sinclair talks with him about it.

Hillary Clinton's biggest hurdle to the White House is its current resident.According to an analysis by the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, if President Barack Obama doesn’t reach a consistent 50 percent favorability rating by Election Day 2016, Clinton, should she decide to run for president, would have a difficult, if not impossible, chance of winning the race. "Even though he will not be on the ballot, however, evidence from past open-seat presidential contests indicates that the public’s evaluation of Obama’s performance in office will have...

Scientists are closer to finding a galactic 'skeleton' that they believe could be lurking inside the fabric of our galaxy. Discovering these 'bones' could help researchers get a better picture of the Milky Way looks like from the outside. A US team has already discovered one of the galactic bone while studying a dust cloud nicknamed 'Nessie'. Catherine Zucker, an undergraduate physics student at the University of Virginia, claims to have found six candidates for galactic bones in a new study. 'What I was trying to do was basically prove that the Nessie filament wasn...

Joanna Weidenmiller is an anomaly in Silicon Valley. The 32-year-old founder and CEO of 1-Page, a San Francisco-based recruiting technology company opted to go public this past October rather than continue raising funding from venture capital firms. Weidenmiller’s startup became the first Silicon Valley company to list on the ASX. The gambit paid off. The stock has gone up over 600% Weidenmiller tells Fast Company, making the company’s valuation soar to over $160 million. Yet as Weidenmiller fills in the details about her life and career, it’s easy to see why s...

Researchers at the University of Virginia have learned that what happens to the body after sustaining a major spinal injury could actually help doctors treat some serious medical conditions. Researchers have singled out an immune system response that happens after someone sustains an injury to their central nervous system previously thought to be harmful. Doctors say the reaction could not only help them treat brain and spinal injuries but also treat conditions like ALS, Multiple Sclerosis, and Alzheimer's.

Fewer than half of the elite research institutions that comprise the Association of American Universities will participate in that group's effort to anonymously survey students about the prevalence of sexual assault on campuses. The association said Thursday that 27 of its 60 U.S. members, including the University of Virginia, and one non-member college will join the effort.

Virginia lawmakers are far from consensus on legislation dealing with sexual assault on college and university campuses. That was apparent at the end of a two-hour hearing Thursday by a Senate subcommittee wrestling with the issue. Most controversial was the concept of mandatory reporting. Some of the measures would require university employees who become aware of an alleged sexual assault to report it to a law-enforcement agency within 24 or 48 hours. Failure to do so would be a misdemeanor. Several witnesses warned that such a mandate would discourage victims from reporting assaults at all. ...

My daughter is five years old, and is very bright and articulate. I will see to it she never attends U.Va. That bit of rather direct language comes from university documents retrieved through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The documents consist of more than 150 pages of e-mails that passed through University of Virginia Dean of Students Allen Groves over nearly two weeks after the Rolling Stone hit the Internet.  They depict a university administrator hustling to keep up with the fast-moving response to Rolling Stone’s story, dealing with hard-edged e-mails from detrac...

In 2013 the University of Virginia official student fan group, The Hoo Crew, was recognized as the best student section in the country, winning the Naismith Award and beating out schools like the University of Kansas, Arizona, and Virginia Commonwealth University. The organization is hoping to build off their reputation and have started an endowment to raise money for the group to travel to more sporting events and support more teams at UVa.

More than 800,000 students at 28 college campuses, including the University of Virginia, will be asked about sexual assault this spring, one of the largest surveys ever on the topic. The Obama administration has made the issue a priority, and the number of federal investigations into how colleges investigate reports of sexual violence has increased dramatically. Many universities have made their own attempts to change campus culture and ensure that students are safe, but there are many students complaining that officials are too worried about bad publicity to tackle th...

Two University of Virginia economists say they have found a way to quantify love.UVa professors Leora Friedberg and Steven Stern looked at married couples' answers to two questions about the quality of their marriage, combined with their divorce rates six years later, and the results surprised even them.

A newly launched clinical research study at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is examining whether an artificial pancreas can prevent too low blood sugar levels or hypoglycemia in patients with type 1 diabetes as they sleep. A collaboration between Mount Sinai, the University of Virginia and Mayo Clinic, the outpatient study, the first of its kind in New York, began enrollment in October 2014. The ongoing study is measuring the ability of an automated artificial pancreas system developed by UVA to normalize nighttime sugar levels in T1D patients. By combining a smart p...

Healthcare providers, you have been warned: Give patients what they want.That was the consensus by a panel of healthcare experts gathered by the American Hospital Association on Tuesday, who all agreed that having patients that are increasingly shopping around puts the onus on providers is to pay attention to consumer behavior and make healthcare accessible. That even means delivering care to the home either in person or virtually through telehealth. Pam Sutton-Wallace, CEO, University of Virginia Medical Center, said the system she oversees has 139 connected sites, including health cente...

Need help launching a telehealth program, or wondering what your state allows? There's a place for that. Fourteen, in fact. They're called telehealth resource centers, 12 of which cover specific regions and two serve as national centers. Kathy Hsu Wibberly, director of the Mid-Atlantic Telehealth Resource Center, says they're not as well known as they should be, but they provide valuable resources. Her TRC, launched in 2011, is based at the University of Virginia Center for Telehealth and covers a vast expanse of eight states (Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, K...

(By W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Home Economics Project of the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies) Guess which kind of family was left out in the cold by President Obama as he unveiled his plan to help middle-class families in his State of the Union address? The traditional two-parent family with a single breadwinner. The president pitched his plan as part of an agenda in which “everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules&rd...

In his State of the Union Address Tuesday, President Barack Obama urged Congress to expand family leave and paid sick days for American workers. According to Marketplace.org, Obama backs the proposed Healthy Families Act, which would offer an hour of paid sick time for every 30 hours worked. But there may be a hidden downside for workers who take advantage of sick leave, family leave and other flexible work policies. “It’s workplace by workplace, and saying that we as a society think this is important,” Christopher Ruhm, a professor of public policy and economics at...

One of those, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, was crucial in last year's Hobby Lobby decision by the Supreme Court. It let for-profit employers who oppose contraceptives on religious grounds exclude them from health insurance coverage. Without the statute, a forerunner of RLUIPA, "Hobby Lobby would probably have lost," says Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia.